But this means they’ll have less time to reveal the map by climbing to the top of towers.
Another company that doesn’t want to waste shitloads of money on an office and force employees to suffer due to poor choices.
Or you can quit so they don’t need to pay severance.
Is this just the new norm for companies?
Looks like it. It’s something you need to negotiate during your job interview otherwise you’re fucked. Every company I looked at during my last round of job search was going for that bullshit 3 days at work 2 at home thing. Infuriating. Meanwhile, having our team leader be in an office on the other side of France and remotely manage several dozen people in a different site is apparently totally fine and not the same at all.
I learned recently that it’s called “unregretted attrition”.
I know this behaviour from big corporations is not exclusive to French companies but my type of work allows me to work from home and I’ve never seen a company despise WFH so much than my once French employer.
This was before the pandemic and I had the habit of working from home with my previous employer when I was sick. When I changed employer to work for a French hosting company in Montreal, they were adamantly against WFH. Even if sick. They preferred that you missed a day (or two, you know, take your time to recover!1!!) from work, taking “generous” sick days, than letting anyone from the lower ranks WFH. This was a pretty big red flag for me. Anyway their work culture was pretty toxic and I ended up quitting after a few months, but the “no work from home even if sick” policy is the first thing that hit me when I started there.
My current employer allows me to WFH and I’ve been looking a bit around to see if I could find something else, but they mostly all seem to require some sort of hybrid schedules at the office now, which obviously sucks.
My experience with French companies is that they never even work. The French take so much vacation time off you can hardly get anything done. They are regularly out worked by just about every other country on the face of the Earth.
They have the same mandated 4 weeks paid vacation as the rest of the EU. National holidays seems to be 11, which is similar to germany.
I do have the impression of france workers going on a strike a lot though, maybe thats what you mean. If you are from the us, i can see how 4 weeks vacation can seem like a lot, you dont have the benefit of having decent employee protections
No there’s more to it than that. We have 3 weeks of vacation here in the U.S. and don’t have any problems getting things done.
Four to five weeks of vacation is pretty standard in Europe and I don’t think it has anything to do with productivity. AFAIK, a German or Belgian would pretty much get the same amount of vacation. I’m in Montreal and the standard by law here is two weeks but my contract with a local employer is giving me four weeks. And, I’m still working when I’m working, even if I have some vacation time at some point?!
I took eight weeks this year. So you’re saying I (or a French person?) am not getting anything done when I work, because I took some extended vacation time?
Yeah France remains one of the most productive countries in the European Union, so they must be doing something right
Here’s an interesting report on France productivity from 2019: https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2019-11/en_1errapportcnp-10july-final.pdf
It’s not just the vacation. Culturally the French are just slow movers at getting anything done. In a multinational company it seems like France is always playing catch up. Thats isn’t to say France is slowest either. Germany has always been the at very bottom levels of productivity.